Yes, because if collective bargaining goes away, the government and every business in the country will suddenly pay all workers only the minimum wage. No workers in the entire world would ever make more than 2 cents an hour and work in reasonable, comfortable conditions if it weren't for the almighty unions, from whom all good things come.

Only, what I picture is a stampede of drunk Ernest Hemingway look-alikes in professorial robes running down the street, chasing 'Tenure' and trampling anyone who gets in their path, until they all run off the end of a dock at Berkley Bay Marina...

"And then they see, uh, Republicans are very good at channeling that anger toward what? Government, immigrants, public employees. Well, an angry population and an angry populace could just as easily turn their anger toward the very rich. Again, it is in the interest of the people at the top to actually call for a more equitable distribution of the gains of economic growth and a better tax system: a tax system that is fair."

I'm sure when he says "fair", he doesn't mean "everyone pays the same percentage". Just a hunch.

I went to grad school for chemistry here in Michigan in the 80's and was SHOCKED to find out that our university professors had a union and actually went on strike my second year there. What the heck does a person who makes a reputation on their own individual, UNIQUE research need a union for? Drive me even further into the Reagan camp.......

I have a (non-Asian) friend who got his PhD in electrical engineering at Berkeley and he is very happy working in industry in a non-union job, making a good enough salary that he and his wife have a lovely house in Austin, a beach house in Corpus, and she does not have to work. If only he were in a union, then their lives would be good.

What exactly do they think is going to happen if they lose collective bargaining rights?

Everyone in the world will receive pay cuts, except for rich people. Those rich people will begin to use the poor people for sport, like gladiator combat, women will be raped at gunpoint and impregnated and forced to carry it to term, animals will be butchered in the most painful manner as food, whales will be hunted to extinction, people of color (like me) will be hunted down and lynched or be caged like animals on display, children will be indoctrinated into National Socialism, and the poor Mother Earth will be raped, pillaged, and destroyed for corporate greed until global warming/climate change finally kills all life on the planet...

So, you Wisconsinites best pony up the dough for the unions, or we're all fucked.

Of course collective bargaining and unions have done so much for the adjuncts, on whom most teaching devolves, who generally have no job security or benefits.

This year, we have spent $217,000 on adjuncts. Since we pay $667 per credit hour (which I don’t think is nearly enough), we have used about 325 credit hours of adjunct time, or the equivalent of roughly 13.5 full-time faculty members. To hire 13.5 full timers at our average salary would cost about $810,000. In reality, we would mostly start with entry-level hires, so for the sake of argument, let’s say we’d spend around $725,000 on them. In addition, we’d need to pay benefits, which we don’t now offer to adjuncts, and that would add another $239,250 in costs. Thus, hiring enough full-time faculty members to eliminate our use of adjuncts would cost $964,250. Minus the adjunct expenses, that would be a net increase of $747,250.

I think the student is confused because his Berkeley-trained Gender Studies professors, while not actually unionized at UW, are the ones always pushing for it. They're the types who can't understand why other UW faculty in more serious departments make twice as much as they do.

If faculty were unionized, as TAs are, you'd have Blah Blah Studies faculty making the same as, say, economics faculty. This would limit the ability of real departments to attract good people. The problem already exists with attracting good graduate students--the Physics TA makes the same as a Communications TA.

If the Wisconsin plan to kill the public employees’ unions succeeds, then there will be little union money in the future to support democratic candidates. Conservatives will be effectively unopposed in raising campaign funding in most elections, including the presidential elections. This will mean a thoroughly conservative America in every issue area.

The media, with few exceptions, is failing to get at the deeper issues.

These idiots do not understand the issue or our country. If you listen to the new video out yesterday of their mobbing of the GOP legislator at the WI Statehouse, you can hear one of them angrily yell, "Give us back our democracy!"Those words aptly apply to the fleebaggers, not the GOP.They are a bunch of Lord Of The Flies savagage who haven't addressed the facts and only emotionally react to yesterday's emotional triggers.

Collective bargaining and unions haven't done much for adjuncts, who do the bulk of teaching without benefits or job security.

Students are paying the price of being taught by faculty who are offered, as a rule, the bare minimum of institutional support. This happens at colleges which boast various union chapters, including AAUP union affiliates. The Connecticut State system comes immediately to mind. In the AAUP’s contract, part-time faculty union member pay is actually capped by a clause that restricts pay maximums, and the contract gives administrators permission to withhold any part-time faculty member’s final paycheck until “obligations” have been met. In the contract, professional development and travel money are divvied up 90 percent-10 percent between the full-time and part-time faculty thanks to the AAUP union negotiators.

It's politically incorrect to impute selfish motives to unionized "public servants," so you have to flip the self-interested abandonment of students to a euphemistic "can't afford" the loss of "collective bargaining."

So from an economic standpoint, why would get a doctorate from an expensive university only to go into profession that doesn't pay that well, certainly not well enough to pay off their student loans.

A little know fact: Most people getting PhDs do not pay tuition. Unless it's a professional doctorate, like physical therapy or law or something, it's hard not to get funding that doesn't come with tuition remission. Admissions are more competitive because of this, of course...

Even if you were paying at Berkeley, it would be much, as it's subsidized by the fine taxpayers of California.

It's certainly appropriate to criticize the sense of entitlement that some people with fancy degrees have, but I don't think it's okay to denigrate their accomplishments. Then again, my Ph.D. advisor got his Ph.D. from Berkeley, so I'm not very objective on this. A lot of great scientific work comes out of Berkeley.

Question of the day:"What exactly do they think is going to happen if they lose collective bargaining rights?"

'Minds me of something my five-year-old daughter once said. We were talking about the possibility of traffic delays on a trip and how much extra time to allot. I think I said, "Well, what's the worst that could happen?" My daughter's eyes grew wide, and she said in hushed tones, "Someone's life could come to an end!"

I keep posting this and the spam filter or whatever keeps eating it, I guess we just can't include links any more.

Collective bargaining have done alomst nothing for adjuncts, who do the bulk of teaching without security or benefits; if faculty are unionized their representation is just rolled in with the tenured faculty, who get the bulk of all the advantages, but adjuncts still have to pay the union dues.

I'd love to add a link to cite, but every time I do my post disappears.

Not true here in Wisconsin when I got mine. Tuition was removed from our paychecks. We were granted in-state tuition, however, the NSF grant I was working on through my major professor picked up the out-of-state portion.

Once you were through with classes, however, and just doing research as a dissertator, the tuition amount charged dropped by a lot. That was a nice economic incentive to get done with classes.

Gabriel, I used to teach as adjunct in local colleges: Towson, UMBC, Loyola... I never had to pay union dues at any of them. But then they never paid me anything much either, a couple of thousand per class. If they had tried to charge me I would never have taken the job.

The motive behind the Robert Reich Dems is now clear for all to see. First stop all productive work, and replace it with made up government show work. Then stop extraction of our productive energy resources, and use the resulting collapsed economy as the excuse to start a mass extraction of Baby Boomer's assets. They are thieves who are now threatening murder.

It's all clear now. If teachers loose their collective bargaining in Wisconsin Governor Moonbeam will strip the faculty of UC Berkeley of their salaries and benefits. The average salary (not including benefits)is $145,800 for a professor at Berkeley.

Earlier this week, Williamson said he was hoping to get his parking permit quickly. The university's chancellor was holding a banquet in his honor, Williamson said, "and I'm hoping that he has in his pocket the parking pass, but we'll see."

Still, he said, "I won't be disappointed if I have to struggle for the next six weeks without it."

As it turned out, Williamson did not receive the permit at the chancellor's dinner, but upon hearing of his interview with NPR, the chancellor produced a handwritten temporary parking permit for Williamson on the spot.

Nobel in Economics

The spots are near Chemistry, Physics and Econ, the only departments that currently have prizes :)

In 1998 I heard a teacher, who I knew had a masters degree, tell a Madison school board candidate that, "Without the union, I am nothing." At that moment I realized I did not want to raise a child in Madison's schools. I left the state when my daughter was three.

The first are the ones in scientific disciplines. They do quite well and much of their work eventually finds its way into the corporate world - that's how Cisco got started - and the profs make very good money off it.

The second are the ones with the PhDs in PC and Demonstrating and I don't doubt for a minute they would be lost without the union.

If the Wisconsin plan to kill the public employees’ unions succeeds, then there will be little union money in the future to support democratic candidates."

At least we're getting a step toward honesty. They still won't admit using taxpayer money to fund the Democratic Party gives them an unfair advantage, but at least they admit that's the issue.

This is more evidence lefties are bizarrely out of touch. Does anyone outside the hard left think the public generally agrees that Democrats should be funded out of public funds? It's true that without them the government would be somewhat more conservative. The unfair advantage the spoils system (Public Unions, ACORN's children, grants etc) gives Democrats has left us a government far to the left of average people. Removing that advantage would leave us a government closer to mainstream American politics.

If a student is working as an RA/PA/TA or is funded through a "training grant", then the student isn't paying tuition out of their pocket. The Department or project funding the Assistantship, or the training grant, pays the tuition to the University at the in-state rate.

Not exactly the same as a tuition waiver or remission from the Institution's perspective, but from the student's perspective it might look the same.

The first are the ones in scientific disciplines. They do quite well and much of their work eventually finds its way into the corporate world

I don't know. Not much use for Lawrencium :)

PS: Albert Ghiorso discovered 12, count'em, 12 elements while at Cal, and that wasn't enough to win a Nobel. He was just a "smasher" empiricist, not a theoretical physicist

Can't speak to your example, but a lot of medical and tech advances have paid handsomely for many Berkeley profs over the years - I agree atom-smashing may not yield huge commercial applications, but I had to do a paper on the subject a couple of years ago and was impressed by the number of Berkeley's scientific faculty that had done well in the corporate world.

Not sure how this is related to the discussion, but no. There are many many people with doctorates who are not tenured Professors at a University where tenure means something like a guarantee of continued employment.

Andrew said... As a Cal grad, I am going to assume this means that Madison students look up to Berkeley.

well as a Davis grad, my comeback is, if they really looked up to Cal, would they call it Berkeley?

inside joke folks. The students at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, look down at thus of us from the other more plebian campuses, like the "Farm" at Davis. the rest of the schools are UCLA, UCxx or UCD, or UCx while the Berkeleyites prefer their sweatshirts and bumper stickers to say "Cal" or "UC"

the rest of us just blow raspberries :)

On the other hand, Davis has happy cows and good wine, two things Madison doesn't :)

"What exactly do they think is going to happen if they lose collective bargaining rights?"

Fair and equal treatment according to merit - the scariest thing on earth to a union worker or anyone on the left.

I'm so proud of the conservatives right now. I don't believe in racial pride or even national pride, because I didn't choose those affiliations, but after a youth as a liberal, I chose to be conservative and I'm prouder than ever of that.

The distinction is so clear, and my choice so right. The superiority of freedom and free markets over what currently passes for liberalism and progressive thought is stark, invigorating, calming and incredibly humbling in its power and simplicity. A Free people is a beautiful thing and a beautiful thing is a joy to pursue and support.